


his right hand arm man

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: M/M, Seduction, Tall Tales, jenny slate voice who can never be sure?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:54:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27705860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: Hickey tells Tozer stories of the Captain.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Cornelius Hickey, Cornelius Hickey/Sgt Solomon Tozer
Comments: 19
Kudos: 36
Collections: Hickeyshipping 2020





	his right hand arm man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TomBowline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/gifts).



If what Hickey says is true—

—but it cannot be true. 

Inconceivable, that a man of rank would stoop to such depravity. Trapped in the ice they are all beholden to their urges, yes—Navy men have their particular ways, as Tozer knows well—but this lowness, in the expedition’s commander? 

“That’s a good one, Mr. Hickey,” Tozer says, the first time he hears the tall tale. “With all your duty owing don’t you have better things to be doing than spinning yarns?” 

Hickey leans back from the mess table, tucking a strand of russet hair behind a pink ear. “Turn your eye to the Captain—you’ll see the sort of man he is. And you already know what sort I am, Sergeant… You’ll see I’m not lying.” 

Tozer thinks upon this; he doesn’t see the harm. So he watches. 

And damn Mr. Hickey for a scoundrel and a pervert, but the more Tozer sees of the Captain, in these darkening days of polar autumn, stumbling down the passageways of the canted ship, slurring his way through what passes for Divine Service, the more Hickey’s stories seem to make a sick sort of sense. 

“How did you know?” Tozer asks, eventually. “That he wanted it.” 

“There were signs,” Hickey answers. “I knew how to read them. You learn these things.” 

Tozer can recall standing at attention during muster, while Crozier went down the line of men, inspecting them for cleanliness. The caulker’s mate always seemed to have some minor complaint, a button missing or a stained collar, to give the Captain cause to stop and reprimand him. Each time, Hickey’s rejoinder would just about tread the line of insubordination, and the Captain would parry back, something snappish on the surface but with an oddly tolerant tenor beneath. This volley might go on until the men started to snicker and squirm, and then the Captain would recollect himself, issue some perfunctory penalty, making sure Mr. Jopson noted it down before moving on to the next lad. 

Hickey says the Captain is not like him—which is to say he was not born under Mars; he once was a man like most men, courting and proposing and dancing with the side-curled ladies of London-town—but instead has reached this rotted, addled state through a long slide into moral decay. A lifetime of addiction and frustration has burst the seams of his manhood and made him a creature of shameful need—a need which only Mr. Hickey can fulfill. 

Grinning, he describes the Captain’s prick in detail: an ugly little thing, its drooping hood giving it an almost druidical aspect, unable to rise past a cursory, comical swelling. Instead Hickey takes it soft into his mouth while, with the same slim fingers he uses to twist up his cigarettes, he breaches Crozier’s fundament and milks hoarse cries of pleasure from him, along with sad spurting emissions that spill down his thighs.

It disgusts Tozer to hear, and then it fascinates; and before long it does not matter if the stories are true or not, for increasingly he cannot see the Captain as anything other than impotent, unworthy of command.

“Why you, then?” Tozer asks. “Of all the men…” 

“I see what he can’t,” says Hickey. “A clouded man like that needs—” he waves his hand, like a street preacher— “clarity. Don’t you agree?” 

It’s true that Hickey is the most observant man Tozer has ever known. After all, a caulker must see the cracks in everything; Hickey can spy the flaws invisible to untrained eyes, or rather, eyes too well-trained by Navy routine to notice the unusual. 

To hear Hickey tell it he is not sinning but doing a service, in slipping into the Captain’s berth during the middle watch and buggering him with insistence. Were it not for his sweetly tempering effect, Hickey swears, _Terror’s_ crew would be subject to the unchecked and violent whims of a sodden despot. He wants Tozer to be grateful.

“Has he told you of plans for this winter?” Tozer says, thinking of the safety of his own men, the threat of the bear and the natives always lurking at the edges of his mind. 

“He whispers to me,” Hickey says, his voice gone dreamy. “Strokes my hair like I’m a little girl—twists my nipples, just so—calls me things in Irish. I fetch more whiskey for him and once he’s drunk it down he sucks me off, drooling round my prick as if a dog. He’s asked for my piss in his mouth but I tell him I shall not, but perhaps if he begs more sweetly…” 

There is still the chance that he is lying. There is still the chance this whole thing is the exaggerated product of the mind of a deranged fabulist, one who believes it is real with all his heart, even as he spouts filthy untruths. From past voyages Tozer knows men showing signs of scurvy tend severely to nostalgia and fantasy: perhaps Hickey is sick, and dreams sick dreams, rising with the belief that his fevered nighttime visions were waking life.

The stories change in the telling, shift like the curtained aurora shining above the deck during frigid night watches. Does Crozier like it when Hickey rakes the white half-moons of his nails down his back, digging in hard as he fucks him, or is it the soft and gentle brushes of Hickey’s whiskers on his pocked cheek he prefers? Does he lay a clammy hand on Hickey’s waist and pull him close, or does he shove him outright from the berth as soon as their assignations end? 

In any case it is Tozer’s mind, now, that is sick as well. The images stalk him in the night: the Captain and the caulker’s mate as one singular fleshy beast, skin slick and shining, unearthly noise and smell. Pricks and hands and spit and seed. Lines crossed and order upturned, all too easily in this place beyond places—what’s the use, in trying to make sense of it? The sun will stop rising any day now. 

**Author's Note:**

> title is from [this iconic video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cYr2OCqXxs) which really sums it up. 
> 
> i'm on [tumblr](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com) and [twitter!](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe)


End file.
